264 Azotes 071 Sport and Travel i 



growing roots or artificial grasses as the Tierra del 

 Fuegians ; the consequence of which naturally was, 

 that in hard winters the cattle died by hundreds and 

 thousands. The regular practice was to kill everj' 

 second calf, and even with this restriction of stock, 

 there died in the parish of Kildonan, during the 

 spring of 1807, two hundred cows, five hundred 

 head of cattle, and more than two hundred ponies, 

 of sheer starvation. It is a positive fact that not 

 sixty years ago the wretched people had occasionally 

 to support life by bleeding the cattle, and mixing the 

 blood with meal into a loathsome sort of black 

 pudding. 



When the military system was changed the drain 

 of able-bodied men ceased, for no earthly power but 

 the authority of the chief could induce the Highlander 

 to enter the army for a lengthened period : his horror 

 of foreign service was intense, — the shameful way in 

 which the Highland regiments had to be trepanned 

 into going abroad is a matter of histor>' ; and the 

 whole system broke hopelessly down. The country 

 became filled with able-bodied men who looked on 

 manual labour with the most intense scorn, and left 

 all the hard work to the women with an assumption 

 of superiority worthy a Red Indian or a Prussian. 

 In the beginning of the nineteenth century they 

 deserved the reproach which had been cast upon 

 their neighbours in the seventeenth by their own 

 clansman : — 



' The people of that country are so far naturally 



